That's not consistent with the reality of the rest of the world. Australia banned guns in 1996 and has had one mass shooting since, compared to 66 in the US in April of this year.
I never found this argument convincing. There are many differences between Australia and the US. It's like saying "American does X and is wealthy and relatively not corrupt, Mexico should just do X". This is the whole "bring democracy to the Middle East" argument repackaged.
US is 59th in murder rate. A lot of these countries have all those things + restrictive gun laws. You can't have a theory and just arbitrarily section off over 50% of countries and test your theory on that subset
The other 58 are either extremely poor or in an actual war/insurgency. I don't deny that poverty and war cause violence but the US does not have those variables
Both those countries require everyone to experience military service, where such a gun is used as a tool to kill. There's much less of a "gun culture" in those countries because guns aren't cool, everyone has used one, everyone is familiar, everyone understands what they are for, namely protection of the country as a whole.
If the alternative to making guns much harder to access is to conscript everyone in the country for a few years to try and beat the gun culture out of them, good freakin luck
I have no doubt that Australia has fewer mass shootings than the US by pretty much any reasonable metric, but we should be careful in our comparisons. First of all, definitions vary widely on what constitutes a “mass shooting”, so we should always give our definition and make sure we’re applying the same definition to both operands (notably, by most common definitions, Australia has had several mass shootings and quite a few more mass murders since 1996).
We should also adjust for known dependent variables, like population, population density, crime rates, number of guns in circulation (i.e., we would intuitively expect fewer mass shootings from a small, sparse, low-abiding country with few guns in circulation irrespective of gun laws)—Australia has only 8% of the US population and only 10% of the density—not sure about crime rates. I also suspect there were fewer guns in circulation prior to 1996, so even if officials could get the same share removed from the US market, it would likely leave more guns in circulation than in America (even adjusting for population, etc)—I also doubt Americans would be as willing to give up their guns as Australians were in ‘96, so the odds that America could get the same share of guns off the market as Australia did seems unlikely.
That said, I’ve read that Australia’s gun count has crept back up to pre-96 levels (not sure if that is per capita or not), which is interesting—potentially it suggests there’s something else going on: either it matters what type of guns are banned (e.g., semi-automatic handguns), or perhaps there’s an altogether different reason or hidden factor behind the decline in Australian mass shootings.
In any case, mass shootings is probably the wrong metric, but rather we probably want to look at number of mass murder deaths overall (presumably some people switch to stabbings or arson, but both of these are probably result in fewer fatalities). It’s also not clear to me why we fixate on mass murders/shootings rather than homicides overall—is it really worse when 10 people are killed all at once rather than 10000 people killed individually?
It was the first fatal mass shooting in the UK since the Cumbria shootings of 2010. In response, the Home Office announced that it would issue updated guidelines for firearms licence applications.
Mass shootings are rare in the UK, with the most recent previous being a spree shooting in Cumbria in 2010, and the one before a school shooting in Dunblane in 1996.
Along with the 1987 Hungerford massacre and the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, it is one of the worst criminal acts involving firearms in British history.
First off, you didn't say "school" originally, you just said mass shooting and there have been several in the UK since the gun ban; also it doesn't matter if innocent people are killed at a school or elsewhere, what matters is that they were killed. Secondly, the "zero deaths" shooting had 12 wounded; the lack of deaths wasn't for a lack of trying and I'm sure those people would have preferred not to have been shot. Thirdly, most of those American mass shootings in the Wikipedia article aren't mass shootings in that they aren't some crazy killing random strangers, they are gang violence; you may as well include all of the UK's gang homicides then. Many of the school "mass shootings" also had no deaths. For example, Wikipedia counts this as a school shooting: "An individual who was not a student accidentally shot himself in the leg in the parking lot of Glades Central High School". No reasonable person can say that is the same as what happened in Texas, and dozens of the "school shootings" in the list are similar to the parking lot accident.
The deadliest mass shooting of all time happened in France in 2015 and the second deadliest happened in Norway in 2011 (yes, deadlier than any American mass shooting). Europe has had a large number of mass killings. Here's a PARTIAL list (since there are no activist groups compiling lists of "mass" "shootings" in Europe like there are in the US, it's difficult to find them without scanning old news articles) of SCHOOL shootings in Europe over the last twenty years (and yes it is fair to compare the US to all of Europe due to population and size; European countries are equivalent to American states (which have varying degrees of gun control)): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31515008. Additionally, there have been a lot of European mass killings that weren't targeted at schools like the Manchester Arena Bombing, Charlie Hebdo, the aforementioned Bataclan and Oslo massacres, the Nice truck attack, the various vehicle ramming attacks in London and elsewhere in Europe, and more. Your gun bans haven't prevented crazies from killing massive amounts of innocents, neither with guns nor with other methods.